4 - Hong Kong and patriarchalist individualism

Summary

It may also seem strange to include a British colony in a sample of case studies chosen to suggest how human and labour rights might best be protected in societies where patriarchalism is hegemonic. In fact, this is one of the main reasons why Hong Kong was chosen. Non-settler colonies have typically been governed on the basis of the rule of law and a patriarchalism, albeit deeply flawed because of its racism – the infamous ‘white man's burden’. Moreover, under normal circumstances and thanks to its largely economic rationale, a preference for arms-length or ‘indirect’ administration has historically informed British, as opposed to, say, French or Spanish, colonialism. The result was that private governance in Hong Kong has remained patriarchalist with respect to both its justification and its practice. For this reason, despite the long persistence of a virulent anti-Chinese racism and its myriad attendant discriminations (Wesley-Smith, 1994a), public governance in Hong Kong too became more and more fully patriarchalist as it was ‘localised’. To begin with, however, this earlier localisation was of a de facto rather than a de jure kind and involved a very narrow and capital-oriented definition of a ‘local’.

Thus the first reason why Hong Kong was chosen was because it represents an instance of a society wherein the mendicancy to which all colonised patriarchalist societies would seem to be prone has been largely overcome thanks to the enforcement of the rule of law.